Popular French Fabrics Discounted

The fine fabrics that decorate France’s most elegant homes, hotels and boutiques have been made popular around the world, largely through the marketing successes of Souleiado, a company that sells distinctive cottons, wools and silk challis in the United States under the Pierre Deux label.

Souleiado’s traditional provincial prints, with cheerfully colorful floral patterns and borders that usually contrast in color and pattern, originated hundreds of years ago in Provence, an area in southeastern France.

Souleiado has two lovely and well-stocked Paris shops, but it is fun to visit company headquarters in Tarascon, a small town on the Rhone River, south of Avignon.

Offices and workshops are housed in a three-story ancient stone mansion at 39 Rue Proudhon. Souleiado’s owners, the Demery family, use their priceless collection of antique woodblocks to create distinctive patterns.

Appointments for guided tours require 24-hour advance notice (call 90-91-08-80 for arrangements), and are limited to about 12 people.

Employees can offer information on the company’s history and explain manufacturing techniques. They also can show the old printing halls where artisans decorate fabrics by hand, and a dusty attic warehouse where more than 40,000 hand-carved fruitwood blocks dating from the 18th and 19th centuries are preserved.

Most of Souleiado’s production--about a million meters of cotton per year--is factory-printed in Alsace. Some woolens and silks are printed in Lyon. About 300 current designs have been adopted from the original woodblocks for modern fabric printing technology. Traditional colors, including strong reds and golds, are still produced, but muted blues, greens and corals have been added to appeal to modern tastes.

Special orders, costing five or six times Souleiado’s factory-printed fabrics, are still printed by hand in the Tarascon ateliers, using 18th-Century techniques. You can see artisans at work carefully covering woodblocks with dyes, setting them on fabric and tapping the blocks with the handle end of a hammer. Fabrics hung to dry create an appealing barrage of color and pattern.

The factory’s courtyard boutique sells remnants, seconds and discontinued patterns for about $8 to $16 per meter for 50-inch-wide cottons, about half the cost of Souleiado’s retail stores in France.

Stock varies from day to day, depending upon production. The boutique also sells quilted carrying bags of various sizes (about $55 to $100), picture frames and notebooks ($10 and up), coin purses ($10) and toiletry bags ($20 and up), and a small selection of clothes made from lovely cottons. Square cotton scarves are $5 and up, and Souleiado umbrellas are about $50.

However, good buys on Souleiado fabrics, home accessories and wearables are also available at the Paris shops, which have a more varied and constant stock.

The shop at 78 Rue de Seine is located in the 6th arrondissement , near several other exclusive French fabric shops. The shop at 85 Rue Paul Dourmer is in the 16th arrondissement’s posh shopping district.

Prices are about 30% less than in the United States. For example, cotton fabrics are priced from about $25 per meter. Large round tablecloths with eight matching napkins cost about $150. Magnificent 63-inch square shawls of a soft, luxurious wool and silk blend, in multicolored floral or paisley-like prints, are about $200 and up. Colorful cotton neckerchiefs cost about $25. Stiff-sided, open-topped market bags, with zippered interior pockets, cost about $60 and up. Wearables, which are no longer sold in the United States, include lovely cotton sun dresses for about $150 and up.

Souleiado is not Paris’ only seller of fine French fabrics. Romanex de Boussac (27 Rue du Mail, in the 6th arrondissement ) produces exquisite cloth, with many of its 200 designs based on the antique patterns found in the company’s extensive archives. The textiles are woven in an Alsacian mill dating from 1783. Designs are organized into themes, ranging from paisleys to plants and other things, including butterflies. Solid color fabrics are coordinated with patterned textiles. Fabrics sell for about $35 per meter and up. The company also sells reproductions of fabrics in Paris’ Museum of Decorative Arts.

Nearby, Comoglio Paris (22 Rue Jacob, 6th arrondissement ) sells reproductions of 18th- and 19th-Century upholstery fabrics. Most of the intricate floral designs originated in the French provinces of Normandy and the Midi. Prices range from $61 to $166 per meter.

An additional range of fabrics sold in bolts or as bed linens, home or personal accessories is available under the label of Manuel Canovas (5 Place Furstenberg, 6th arrondissement ) . Canovas uses some traditional patterns and others of entirely modern conception. Beautiful bed sheets (about $150 and up per queen-size set) are made of the world’s finest cotton, with either modern or traditional floral and geometric patterns in pastels and vivid colors.

Also sold are matching quilts (about $260 and up), pillowcases and shams and nightshirts (about $180 and up). Towels and quilted carryalls ($100 and up) are made in matching and complementary patterns. In addition, Canovas makes magnificent soft scarves of silk and cashmere blend fabric (about $280 and up).

Patrick Frey (47 Rue des Petits Champs, 1st arrondissement, or 2 Rue de Furstenberg, 6th arrondissement ) exhibits an astonishing variety of 5,000 fabric samples in a magnificent mansion that was once the townhouse of Jean-Baptiste Lully, court composer to Louis XIV.

The fabrics, ranging in design from provincial florals to exotic paisleys to postmodern geometrics, are mounted on moving panels. You can spend hours looking for exactly the right pattern for your sofa or drapes. If you want to match something to your decor, bring samples of fabrics you’ve already used. Patrick Frey gives no swatches, and the textiles (priced from about $60 per meter and up) are too expensive to allow for mistakes.

A la Bonne Renommee (26 Rue Vielle du Temple, 3rd arrondissement ) sells home accessories and wearables made from carefully selected country fabrics that are used in a patchwork mixture of colors and patterns. Everything is handmade. Owners Catherine Legrand and Elisabeth Gratacap spend hours fitting together bits of patterned fabrics, ribbons and trimmings to find fascinating combinations.

Some items are monochromatic, with mixtures of stripes, plaids, florals and polka dots that are all black and white, red and white or another color and white. Other pieces use wildly contrasting colors. Quilts cost about $500 to $1,350; cushions are $84 to $210. Small purses cost from $21.

Prices quoted in this article reflect currency exchange rates at the time of writing.